All posts tagged LTE

Many consumers already use their mobile handsets as much for posting Facebook updates, or browsing for news, as for making phone calls.

As the rapid spread of smart phones and netbooks keeps pushing up data traffic, the telecom industry is investing in speedy new networks to meet the demand. Operators across the globe are about to roll out networks based on Long Term Evolution (LTE), a fourth-generation technology, which, compared to the services in use today allows consumers to browse the web far quicker. It also opens up opportunities for a range of new data-heavy mobile services such as streaming HD video and online games.

Sweden’s TeliaSonera has already launched LTE services in Stockholm and Oslo, and peers including Verizon, NTT DoCoMo and AT&T are soon to follow in other markets.

There should be no lack of demand for advanced, data-heavy mobile services, so operators are probably right to invest in faster networks. Apart from being quick, LTE networks are easy to deploy and manage as well, and the new technology makes more efficient use of the spectrum where radio waves travel.

Despite the strengths of LTE, however, it’s going to take a few years before investments in the new networks translate into any substantial earnings boost for the operators, or for gear vendors such as Ericsson and Alcatel-Lucent…

The talk at the Mobile World Congress at Barcelona this week centered on mobile data, which may spur a major new market in machine-to-machine communications, a resurgent WiMax, and a new industry providing an overlay of data to interface with the bricks-and-mortar world.

Mobile data, whereby a user seeks a Web page, for example, has “become consensus” in the telecom industry, Huawei Technologies‘ Chief Strategy Officer Ping Guo told Dow Jones Investment Banker. But the next major market “worth billions” will be machine-to-machine communications, he added.

News that AT&T plans to encourage users to throttle back on their mobile data usage illustrates again the fault line in the industry’s pricing structures. And it looks like technology won’t come to the operators’ rescue – in fact, since a raft of new smartphones comes out next year, the situation could get worse.

The problem is that some users, many on iPhones, are chomping up data like it is going out fashion, with estimates that 3% of AT&T’s mobile customers use 40% of network capacity, resulting in poor service in cities such as San Francisco and New York.

One answer would be to introduce metered pricing, or implement a form of tiered usage packages. This would, in effect, segment the market by data use. But there’s a major problem to this plan, which is mobile voice over the internet. [Read full article over the jump.]